The ChallengeWhen health threats emerge, the nation’s public health laboratories need sufficient capacity to test specimens—especially at the start of a pandemic, when testing volumes increase dramatically.
In the case of the H1N1 influenza virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recognized that specimen volume at public health laboratories could increase well beyond testing capacity and impact CDC’s ability to plan for and respond to outbreaks.
Working with the Association of Public Health Laboratories, CDC engaged Booz Allen Hamilton to assess capacity at 20 laboratories most likely to test specimens during an influenza pandemic.
Booz Allen leveraged its expertise in capacity and resource modeling and simulation, laboratory management, and health IT to customize a Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction model for each lab. The team collected data on each lab’s processes, staffing, shifts, and equipment, and used this information to address three issues:
The outcome: Recommendations for increasing capacity around bottlenecks and strategies for process improvements, which could increase each lab’s average testing capacity by 138%, from 82 to 195 specimens per day.
For example, the team demonstrated how labs could quickly process more samples and maintain accurate diagnoses by “pooling” specimens for testing during the early stages of a pandemic, when influenza cases were still rare but testing demand was already high.
The labs used many of these recommendations in their response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. As a result of the project’s success, U.S. and foreign government agencies have asked Booz Allen to help assess capacity and improve testing performance at several lab networks.
Download a PDF version of the case study entitled, "Capacity and Resource Planning: Helping the CDC and Public Health Laboratories Combat Pandemic Influenza."
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